FD&C is an American labelling standard, which stands for Food, Drugs and Cosmetic. FD&C dyes have gone through rigorous testing, which makes them safe for use in foods and cosmetics, however, they are artificially made (not natural) and I will leave it up to you to decide if they are healthy or not. The main difference between the FD&C dyes and lakes, is that the FD&C dyes are soluble in water and that the lakes are produced from the FD&C dyes and an aluminium salt, which makes the lake oil-dispersible (but not oil-soluble), meaning it can be mixed with oil.
For the following tests, I used lakes from Pure Nature, which are available for $5 for 10 g. These are strong colourants and they will last you for quite a while. Although, I don’t recommend them for cold process soap, you can still use them in other products, such as lotions, bath bombs and melt and pour soaps.
Pure Nature has the following lakes available:
- Sunset yellow – FD&C yellow 5
- Sunset orange – FD&C yellow 6
- Allura red – FD&C red 40
- Brilliant blue – FD&C blue lake 1
They are all non-toxic, and approved for food and cosmetic use.
Cold process soap
As mentioned earlier, lakes are best dispersed in oil, and will not dissolve in water. However, I tested the lakes mixed with both water and oil, and the results were the same. Just make sure you give the bottle with water a good shake before each use. The usage rate for lakes in cold process soap is 1/8 – 1/4 teaspoon of colour, mixed with 1 tablespoon oil, per 500 g of soap. I used 1/4 teaspoon per 500 g soap in the tests.
You can see in the picture above, that the lakes don’t always perform in cold process soap. The blue lake turned into purple shade after gelling, before gelling it was a greyish shade and the red was orange. The reason for this is that the FD&C dyes don’t like the high pH environment during the soap making process. This is the same reason why food colouring doesn’t work in cold process soap making and some micas can give you funny results. The only lakes that seem to stay true to their colours are yellow and orange, and red only after gelling, which doesn’t leave you with a lot of options for colour mixing.
Melt and pour soap
Melt and pour bases are finished soap bases to which you only add colour and fragrance. That means that you can’t add extra water or oil to the bases. You also can’t add the powder directly to the soap, because it will leave speckles in your soap.
Pre-mixing the lakes in glycerin, on the other hand, will give you bright, even colours throughout your soap. The colours will stay true, because there is no saponification like in cold process soap, and they are very easy to blend.
The only problem you might come across is when you didn’t mix the colour properly into the glycerin. In this case, you will get speckles at the bottom of the soap. Always mix well and shake bottle before use!
Bath bombs
Lakes are often used to colour bath bombs, because, as powders, they are easy to mix into the dry ingredients and result in brightly coloured bath bombs. To use the lakes, add a pinch of colour to your finished bath bomb mixture. Only add only a tiny amount at a time because they are quite strong in colour. Keep adding until you reach the colour you desire. To achieve the colours in the pictures below, I added 0.3g (two 0.15CC scoops) to 1 cup of bath bomb mixture. As I said, you only need a very tiny amount!
However, using the lakes in powder form will leave the bath bombs speckled, because the colours don’t blend with the other ingredients (remember: not water-soluble). An alternative option is to pre-mix the lakes with glycerin. Glycerin won’t make your bath bombs fizz and it will blend the bath bombs more evenly. Another advantage of pre-mixing the lake with the glycerin is that you can store it for up to a year without having to add a preservative to it.
The colours are a lot more evenly dispersed through the bath bomb, and they mix better than in powder form, as shown in the picture below.
So to summarise, lakes are great for melt and pour bases and bath bombs, as long as you pre-mix them with glycerin. For cold process soap, you have to be aware that they can morph colours and that there are better alternatives out there for cold process soap.
Hi Jackie,
I am just wondering how you suspend the lakes in glycerin? What is the procedure involved in that please? And then do you add it to your wet ingredients rather than into your dry? Thanks!
Hi Kelly! Suspending is just a fancy way of saying adding the lakes to glycerin. From the sound of things, are you making bath bombs? If you have dry and wet ingredients, you can add the lakes straight to the dry ingredients. There’s no need to mix them in glycerin or water first. Otherwise, just mix the amount of lake you want to use with the same amount, or a little more, glycerin.
Hi – thanks for writing such an informative blog, really enjoying reading it!
Just wondering, can you mix different types of colourants? Say you’re using a red mica and it isn’t red enough, can you go ahead and add a little Allura red lake?
Also have you had any issues with colours bleeding with pigments or lakes?
Thanks 🙂
Yes, you can mix different types of colourants, for example a mica and a pigment or a lake, but it’s always best to do a little sample test first, so you can be sure of the outcome. One easy way of doing a sample is to make a little bit more, the next time you make a soap, and use that extra to do a separate colour test. That way, you don’t have to make a batch just for testing one colour! Re bleeding: dyes and lakes will bleed. The pigments usually don’t, and the ones that Pure Nature sell definitely don’t bleed. Hope this helps!
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